Giving the last rites is an emergency service
With Christians now a minority, it is frightening that police have no national guidance on this matter
Hearing news of the attack on Sir David Amess last Friday, Father Jeffrey Woolnough rushed to the scene and asked if he might enter to give the MP the last rites. He says a policeman radioed in the request but it was denied. Fr Jeffrey, who did not know what condition Sir David was in – last rites are not performed on the dead, though, had the person just died, or if there was a doubt, the priest can anoint and absolve – respected this decision and prayed the rosary outside.
I wrote to Essex Police to ask why they might turn away a priest tending to a believer and if they had a national policy on this subject. They replied that it was critical to protect the integrity of a crime scene and to allow emergency services to attend those in need, adding that “access to the scene is at the discretion of investigating officers”. This was confirmed to the Telegraph by the College of Policing, which states that currently there is no national guidance with regards to priests giving the last rites in such conditions.
I find this incredible. And, as a Catholic myself, frightening.
What’s all the fuss about? To Catholics (and some Protestants) the last rites are a final chance for a person to make their peace with God – confessing their sins, being absolved of those sins by the priest and receiving holy communion. (Sometimes, this isn’t physically possible, in which case we leave matters in the hands of the Lord.) The knowledge that one exits this world in a “state of grace” comforts the dying and their relatives.
If it all sounds a bit bizarre, think of it in psychological terms: the Church is our family, God is the father, and all of us want to be close to our loved ones at death. To believers, the soul is actually more important than the body – thus the priest, in a sense, is an emergency service and should be treated as such. Many Catholics carry a card with them that states that if something awful happens, they want a priest present. I’ll be putting one in my wallet from now on.
The lack of a national policy on the last rites implies that whether or not a priest gets access to a dying person might depend upon circumstances (understandable, because one doesn’t want to impede the police from doing their job) – or else, which is far less forgivable, upon the religious literacy of the individual officer on duty.
A few decades ago, in most situations I can imagine the police waving a priest through the barrier because they knew who and what he was and why it was so necessary that he be there. But in an era in which Christians are in a diminishing minority – and Christianity as mysterious to most Britons as voodoo or Morris dancing – this knowledge can no longer be assumed. This makes any absence of guidelines totally unacceptable. Time to write some.
No one is second-guessing what the circumstances were on that horrible day; I merely make a plea for religious belief to be understood for what it is to those who hold it, which is to say more important than life itself. Essex Police has a Twitter banner stating that it values “difference”. Hopefully this applies to Christians, too.
Fr Jeffrey is a member of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, a society for former Anglicans, and Dr Nazir-ali, who has converted to Catholicism after many years as a senior bishop in the Church of England, is about to join the ordinariate, too. It’s no coincidence. Ordinariate priests tend to have a bit of bottle – they gave up money and friends to become a Catholic, so they clearly and confidently believe in Catholic teaching.
What will the English hierarchy make of Dr Nazir-ali? An outspoken social conservative, he has left a Church that isn’t so sure what it believes any more to join a Church that knows what it thinks but prefers to keep quiet about it. The fact is that my Church’s teachings are exotic and stubborn (not just an unfashionable opposition to abortion but things like pilgrimages and holy wells that elites find risible), and much of the hierarchy – reluctant to contradict the spirit of the age, or even desperate to accommodate it – communicates its faith in language that is deliberately vague and inoffensive. A basic reason why people don’t know what the last rites are is because the Church has stopped telling them.
The Telegraph hosted an event for my new book last week which you can now see on Youtube, and one of the questions our brilliant readers asked was: “What does more damage to tradition, communism or liberalism?” It’s the difference between tossing a frog on a fire and slowly boiling him. Revolution vs an imperceptible change that one might confuse for a warm bath.
The culture of choice is so enticing, so easy, and the liberal society so focused on the present, that the idea of a world beyond this one has, for millions become simply redundant. Yet the older I get, the more grateful I am for talking bushes and dog-headed saints – the beliefs that bring colour to a life led not for its own, brief sake but for the hope, someday, to look upon the face of God. Sir David, RIP.